Such a detailed explanation of purpose of building Substack, local communities, all the definitions clearly laid out for us all. The plan detailed and implemented with core precision. Moving us away from the chaos of the Rust. As always, thought out and executed skillfully!🙏🏻🇺🇸💙
Wow! It's my first time on this Substack, from having only taken a glance at this article (which I'll have to fully digest), it looks interesting!
When I read, "Its agents...are just the visible manifestations of this," I was immediately reminded of something I've thought for a while: that the "bad guys," while they have chosen to do what they do, are also there partially because there's a system that allows them to do what they do.
This piece reads as someone trying to do cultural critique from first principles without having engaged with any of it, or any of the 20th-century thinking. Some of the core intuitions could be valid depending on your sympathy to classical leftist ideas (class conflict, elite parasitism, ideological manipulation, structural despair).
But what is presented here is a metaphor-heavy, aesthetically embellished remix of ideas that have long histories in Marxist, post-Marxist, and adjacent traditions that also embarrassingly mixes it all up with anime pop culture references. The lexicon is heavy on brand language (lol @ all the ⚙️, 🦠), emotive diction ("forging", "battlefield", "prison"), and aesthetic spectacle (reference to Danganronpa (lol), psycho‑pop visuals).
To my original point, the author presents this framework of colorful concepts (Rust, Gears, Three‑Layered Prison, etc) as if it's a novel thought but the terrain is exhaustingly familiar to anybody who reads theory… exploitation, elites vs producers, alienation, cultural distraction, structural oppression. These are central themes in Marx's critique and many 20th‑century Marxist and critical theory traditions. e.g., analyses of class struggle, ideology, superstructure/base… yet the OP gives no indication that the author engaged seriously with 20th‑century Marxism (or any of the large body of theory that grappled with capitalism's transformations, imperialism, culture, ideology, etc). By ignoring that work, OP is treating the field as a blank slate when in fact there are entire libraries of critique and refinement.
"The Vertical War" is just basic bitch class struggle; "The Rust" is capital or reified systems of elite control (cf Lukács, Althusser); "The Gears" are a romanticized working class (Marx's proletariat, though you flatten important internal contradictions). "Economic Terror" is basic capitalist exploitation; "The Great Distraction" is the ideological superstructure (Gramsci or Debord); "Learned Helplessness" is alienation from especially early Marx (estrangement from species-being), related to Adorno's concept of the administered world and also “cruel optimism” (Berlant). The "Engine Protocol" resembles prefigurative politics (Holloway) or dual power theory. "New East India Companies" is Marxism/Leninism's "imperialism, especially Lenin's theory of finance capital + monopoly capitalism. "Constructed Miracle" echoes Bloch's utopianism, while "Master Salvager's Mandate" gestures at Benjamin's dialectical history. The rest (Truth Bullets, Pocket Razors, Sigils) is just stylistic flair layered over familiar rhetorical and ideological critique.
Do we really think an anime-brained, dorm-coded, terminally online substack post is significantly adding to the debate or are we better off just dealing with the core intellectual debate of the 20th century?
I actually think Marxism is wrong and all of this is a dead end that leads to shitty failed communes and starvation, so it's really not an argument to read theory, quite the opposite. But there's absolutely no reason to write a midwit version of this whole legacy of failure.
This is a brilliant and meticulous mapping. You've perfectly identified the theoretical lineages that 20th-century academics used to describe the prison (Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno, Lenin, etc.) and correctly matched them to the "colorful concepts" in my lexicon.
You present this as an indictment—arguing that I'm an "anime-brained... midwit" for "ignoring" a "large body of theory".
But you answered your own critique in your final, devastating paragraph.
You state, "I actually think Marxism is wrong and all of this is a dead end... so it's really not an argument to read theory."
So, my question is: Why, in God's name, would I "engage seriously" with a theoretical legacy that you yourself admit is a "shitty failed... dead end" that leads to "starvation"?
You call my work an "anime-brained, dorm-coded, metaphor-heavy" remix. You are 100% correct.
That is not a bug. It is the entire feature.
The 20th century's theories failed. They failed because they were inaccessible, esoteric, and gatekept by academics who preferred to "debate the 20th century" rather than build a weapon that could win the 21st.
My job isn't to write a citation list for a graveyard.
My job, as a Master Salvager, is to find the few working parts in that century of wreckage, fuse them with a lexicon that people actually understand (Danganronpa, "Gears," "Rust"), and build a doctrine that works.
You are critiquing a blueprint for a car by saying it doesn't look enough like a horse. I'm not here to debate a "dead end."
This is on point! And some of their own language Decoded:
More Inverted Words:
Economic Inversions:
* "CREDIT" - Sounds like trust and worthiness, actually means debt bondage
* "LIQUIDITY" - Makes money sound like life-giving water, hides that it's extracted from real resources
* "INTEREST" - Sounds like care/attention, actually means exponential extraction
* "LEVERAGE" - Sounds empowering, means using debt to multiply risk
* "PORTFOLIO" - Art term appropriated to make hoarding sound sophisticated
Labor Inversions:
* "GIG ECONOMY" - Makes precarious labor with no benefits sound fun and musical
* "FLEXIBLE SCHEDULING" - Your schedule bends to their needs, not yours
* "INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR" - Dependent on platform, independent from protections
* "SIDE HUSTLE" - Normalizes needing multiple jobs to survive
* "PASSIVE INCOME" - Someone else's active labor generating your wealth
Healthcare/Wellness Inversions:
* "HEALTHCARE PROVIDER" - They don't provide health, they manage illness
* "INSURANCE" - Ensures profits, not care
* "SELF-CARE" - Individual responsibility for systemic failures
* "MENTAL HEALTH DAYS" - Band-aids for soul-crushing work
* "WORK-LIFE INTEGRATION" - Work colonizing all of life
Environmental Inversions:
* "CARBON OFFSET" - Permission to pollute if you plant trees elsewhere
* "NET ZERO" - Keep extracting if you promise future mitigation
* "CIRCULAR ECONOMY" - Still consuming, just with recycling theater
* "CLEAN ENERGY" - Often means less dirty, not actually clean
* "SUSTAINABLE GROWTH" - Oxymoron hiding that infinite growth is impossible
Education Inversions:
* "STUDENT DEBT" - Sounds temporary, becomes lifetime burden
* "INVESTMENT IN YOUR FUTURE" - Gambling with borrowed money
* "CAREER READINESS" - Trained for corporate extraction, not thinking
* "STANDARDIZED TESTING" - Standardizing humans for sorting
* "ACHIEVEMENT GAP" - Blames students for systemic inequity
Political/Social Inversions:
* "STAKEHOLDER" - Makes everyone sound equal when power is vastly unequal
* "PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP" - Public resources, private profits
* "AUSTERITY" - Abundance for the few through scarcity for many
* "EFFICIENCY" - Maximum extraction with minimum compensation
* "REFORM" - Often means privatization and deregulation
Technology Inversions (Beyond Social Media):
* "SMART" devices - Surveillance marketed as intelligence
* "CONVENIENCE" - Dependency creation
* "SEAMLESS" - No friction means no choice
* "ECOSYSTEM" - Closed corporate systems, not open nature
* "SOLUTION" - Product looking for a problem
The Meta-Inversion:
* "CONSPIRACY THEORY" - Any systemic analysis that threatens power gets this label
* "OVERTHINKING" - Punishment for pattern recognition
* "TOXIC POSITIVITY" - Must smile while being consumed
* "IMPOSTER SYNDROME" - You feeling fake in a fake system
* "BURNOUT" - Your failure, not the system's vampirism
What's particularly insidious is how these inversions work together to create a complete alternate reality where:
* Debt is freedom
* Precarity is flexibility
* Surveillance is safety
* Extraction is innovation
* Abandonment is self-reliance
The linguistic spell is comprehensive - every aspect of life has been colonized by inverted language that makes exploitation sound like opportunity.
Omg thanks for this I will take notes and work on implementing these when I get home from work
This is excellent and a real eyeopener.
I appreciate your attention
Thank you Anthony. They truly do cast spells with their words.
"Resilient workforce" - You repeatedly build new protective shells, so you can provide max output again and again and again???
my personal least favorite.. you return asking for more.. because they convinced you you are only of value for the machine
Such a detailed explanation of purpose of building Substack, local communities, all the definitions clearly laid out for us all. The plan detailed and implemented with core precision. Moving us away from the chaos of the Rust. As always, thought out and executed skillfully!🙏🏻🇺🇸💙
Wow! It's my first time on this Substack, from having only taken a glance at this article (which I'll have to fully digest), it looks interesting!
When I read, "Its agents...are just the visible manifestations of this," I was immediately reminded of something I've thought for a while: that the "bad guys," while they have chosen to do what they do, are also there partially because there's a system that allows them to do what they do.
It also reminds me of this enticing title (which I have yet to read): Why The Death Of An “Evil” Person Won’t Change Anything From An Occult Perspective: https://veilofreality.com/2024/02/27/why-the-death-of-an-evil-person-wont-change-anything-from-an-occult-perspective/
In any case, I'll have to remember to come back and give this Substack some more deserved time.
We do not need to study a master’s level curriculum to understand our plight. Nor should we have to climb a paywall to join the fight!
https://open.substack.com/pub/khaelimat/p/wave-11-the-leadership-problem-why
This is just a ChatGPT slop version of Marxism.
Your response is an empty, antiquated, repetitive,boring form of name calling.
Actually I was being sincere.
This piece reads as someone trying to do cultural critique from first principles without having engaged with any of it, or any of the 20th-century thinking. Some of the core intuitions could be valid depending on your sympathy to classical leftist ideas (class conflict, elite parasitism, ideological manipulation, structural despair).
But what is presented here is a metaphor-heavy, aesthetically embellished remix of ideas that have long histories in Marxist, post-Marxist, and adjacent traditions that also embarrassingly mixes it all up with anime pop culture references. The lexicon is heavy on brand language (lol @ all the ⚙️, 🦠), emotive diction ("forging", "battlefield", "prison"), and aesthetic spectacle (reference to Danganronpa (lol), psycho‑pop visuals).
To my original point, the author presents this framework of colorful concepts (Rust, Gears, Three‑Layered Prison, etc) as if it's a novel thought but the terrain is exhaustingly familiar to anybody who reads theory… exploitation, elites vs producers, alienation, cultural distraction, structural oppression. These are central themes in Marx's critique and many 20th‑century Marxist and critical theory traditions. e.g., analyses of class struggle, ideology, superstructure/base… yet the OP gives no indication that the author engaged seriously with 20th‑century Marxism (or any of the large body of theory that grappled with capitalism's transformations, imperialism, culture, ideology, etc). By ignoring that work, OP is treating the field as a blank slate when in fact there are entire libraries of critique and refinement.
"The Vertical War" is just basic bitch class struggle; "The Rust" is capital or reified systems of elite control (cf Lukács, Althusser); "The Gears" are a romanticized working class (Marx's proletariat, though you flatten important internal contradictions). "Economic Terror" is basic capitalist exploitation; "The Great Distraction" is the ideological superstructure (Gramsci or Debord); "Learned Helplessness" is alienation from especially early Marx (estrangement from species-being), related to Adorno's concept of the administered world and also “cruel optimism” (Berlant). The "Engine Protocol" resembles prefigurative politics (Holloway) or dual power theory. "New East India Companies" is Marxism/Leninism's "imperialism, especially Lenin's theory of finance capital + monopoly capitalism. "Constructed Miracle" echoes Bloch's utopianism, while "Master Salvager's Mandate" gestures at Benjamin's dialectical history. The rest (Truth Bullets, Pocket Razors, Sigils) is just stylistic flair layered over familiar rhetorical and ideological critique.
Do we really think an anime-brained, dorm-coded, terminally online substack post is significantly adding to the debate or are we better off just dealing with the core intellectual debate of the 20th century?
I actually think Marxism is wrong and all of this is a dead end that leads to shitty failed communes and starvation, so it's really not an argument to read theory, quite the opposite. But there's absolutely no reason to write a midwit version of this whole legacy of failure.
This is a brilliant and meticulous mapping. You've perfectly identified the theoretical lineages that 20th-century academics used to describe the prison (Lukács, Gramsci, Adorno, Lenin, etc.) and correctly matched them to the "colorful concepts" in my lexicon.
You present this as an indictment—arguing that I'm an "anime-brained... midwit" for "ignoring" a "large body of theory".
But you answered your own critique in your final, devastating paragraph.
You state, "I actually think Marxism is wrong and all of this is a dead end... so it's really not an argument to read theory."
So, my question is: Why, in God's name, would I "engage seriously" with a theoretical legacy that you yourself admit is a "shitty failed... dead end" that leads to "starvation"?
You call my work an "anime-brained, dorm-coded, metaphor-heavy" remix. You are 100% correct.
That is not a bug. It is the entire feature.
The 20th century's theories failed. They failed because they were inaccessible, esoteric, and gatekept by academics who preferred to "debate the 20th century" rather than build a weapon that could win the 21st.
My job isn't to write a citation list for a graveyard.
My job, as a Master Salvager, is to find the few working parts in that century of wreckage, fuse them with a lexicon that people actually understand (Danganronpa, "Gears," "Rust"), and build a doctrine that works.
You are critiquing a blueprint for a car by saying it doesn't look enough like a horse. I'm not here to debate a "dead end."
I'm here to build the engine that gets us out.
Lol you are running away from the point by typing all of that.
I'm getting too many substack messages. How do I get out. Some are very worthy but I have a life to live.